On a Cross
Allison C Browning
His body was unlike the vehicles he bought,
not sheeny, not sleek, not fast.
His mouth was a crown of thorns.
Or else a rifle’s end.
His nose was Roman, whiffing wine.
His lips were full, Lubra, he’d say, but he ‘wasn’t racist’.
His voice was calm, a pond unstirred.
Or else a high-pressure hose.
His feet were babyish, dark with hair.
His skin was thin, unlike his waistline.
His eyes were silty, like the river across the way.
Or else cesspools of irk.
His eyebrows were unruly, irritated patrons in a crowd.
His legs were stumps, wooden things.
His hands were spanners.
Or else bench vices in the back shed.
His stomach was churned butter.
His confessions were neat parcels of contempt.
His arms were fishing rods for open sea.
Or else flailing branches, striking out.
His words were the emperor’s new clothes.
His tongue was in the ears of those with no choice but to listen,
a razor’s edge.
Or else wrapped around ice-cream.
His objections were many and broad,
more liberal than his politics.
His name was Babe (in a manger).
Or else He or Him.
She was the coat rack in the hall,
iron limbs to hold the weight of his detritus.
Or else for nailing.
Note: ‘On a Cross’ pays homage to Simon Armitage’s ‘Not the Furniture Game’ but re-situates its catalogue of the masculine grotesque within domestic and colonial frames. The inversion asks what occurs when the self-made martyr is crucified by his own making—when power, once exercised outward, is returned.
ALLISON C BROWNING’S work has appeared in Best Australian Poems, Australian Love Stories, Overland, Island Magazine and The Big Issue Fiction Edition. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, NSW Poetry Prize & Dorothy Porter Award for Poetry.
